Workday GO offers growth potential for mid-sized enterprises

Coinciding with its Workday Elevate Summit in Sydney, Workday has announced the expansion of Workday GO into Australia and New Zealand, its new product that provides mid-sized enterprises with an all-in-one HR, payroll and finance solution.

This latest product offering will simplify and accelerate deployments for growing businesses, as Workday seeks to assist companies with converting AI ambitions into tangible business outcomes.

It will target businesses that have been affected by reduced visibility, difficulty with scaling and increased fragmentation as they have outgrown the solutions that were previously able to support them, but lack the robustness for scale and expansion.

This creates an inherent compromise, forcing organisations to distribute a diminishing amount of resources across people, payroll and finance, affecting efficiency and agility, as well as slamming the brakes on potential growth.

Workday has identified this as a significant market that is currently being underserved, with companies in need of competitively priced, scalable, and AI-infused platforms that can be implemented quickly and deliver immediate value and substantial results.

Providing customers with real-time insights into their people and workflows, delivering more efficiency and allowing enterprises to divert resources appropriately, Workday GO is a scalable solution upon which medium companies can launch their growth strategies.

Speaking at Workday Elevate in Sydney's picturesque Darling Harbour, Matt Lovell, Senior Regional Director at Workday Australia, said GO will be a game-changing solution for mid-sized enterprises across Australia and New Zealand.

"I'm incredibly excited about GO," Lovell said.

"I've been with Workday for nearly 10 years. Eight of those years, I've spent it in our mid-market business. And that for us is a huge growth segment here in ANZ.

"What we've noticed is there's a lot of lower-tier solutions that are affordable and simple, but don't have the capabilities or the scalability to continue to grow with organisations as they become larger and more complex.

"We saw these companies that had that tradeoff between cost and capability with quality and scalability. They were having to do these projects every two to three years when they would have a low-tier solution, they'd outgrow it, they'd put in another sort of mid-tier or tier-two type solution, outgrow it, and then go again. 

"Our whole business in the mid-market is often having to untangle that, where they've got these lower-tier solutions and all the wraparound point solutions that they've gone out to plug a gap, all the manual workaround processes that have calcified over the years.

"The No.1 barrier to entry in the mid-market is usually implementation cost. GO is designed to specifically solve all of that, so it's right-sized from a subscription licencing and deployment packaging standpoint."

Myriad businesses across multiple industries are currently adapting to the growth of AI. Workday is no exception, seeking to harness the power of AI to provide even more powerful and efficient people management solutions to customers that are likely on adaptation journeys of their own.

The morning keynote showcased Workday's Candidate Experience Agent, capable of automating interview scheduling (and rescheduling), as well as interacting with prospective employees throughout the recruitment process.

With the load of cumbersome administrative tasks relating to the hiring process now taken off their shoulders, staff become empowered to engage more meaningfully with candidates and to build a pipeline of new talent for the organisation.

Sana is another new offering from Workday, slashing the time taken to handle the time used up by manual tasks, such as contract reviews. Instead of a human spending up to ten hours combing through a spreadsheet for pertinent data, product managers utilising an automated analyser are served up data trends and user segments in just seconds.

As well as being a key aspect of onboarding new staff, AI is becoming critical in employees' continual professional development journey.

Increasingly shirking traditional, mandatory, one size fits all learning modules, workers are hungry for development courses that will really make a difference in their skillset, and perhaps allow them to make a lateral move to a different department within their organisation, with upskilling and long-term career progression in mind.

In a similar vein to how Netflix will suggest more crime dramas after a viewer has finished watching Narcos, Workday Learning can suggest relevant learning to an employee based on their role, skillset and previous learning history.

This curated learning catalogue feeds only relevant content to staff members, allowing them to build their skills with the most pertinent modules.

AI is also significantly more expeditious in creating technical documents and short-form learning content.

"What we're seeing in the market is individual employees want to drive their own career outcomes," Lovell said.

"They don't want to wait for someone to curate a learning and development program with them. They want that autonomy to explore different career paths internally. Our customer AGL uses Career Hub, and they've got around half of all employees globally that have voluntarily gone in and updated their skills profile.

"They can now use that Career Hub and their AI skills matching to explore different opportunities.

"Sana also has the capability to create learning content as well. So where companies used to spend weeks or months building learning courses, we can now do that in seconds.

"You could upload a company policy or a handbook or a slide deck, and it will automatically create that learning content, quizzes, and different test mechanisms in there."